Intelligence

11 December 2014

During the course of Senate hearings more than two decades ago, a major controversy erupted around allegations that a small number of Vietnam-era American prisoners of war (POWs) might have targeted by the Soviets for interrogation/exploitation—namely, POWs who had specialized in highly technical operations such as electronic warfare and electronic intelligence-gathering activities. It was even alleged that some POWs may have been spirited away to the Soviet Union so that the Soviets could take advantage of their technical knowledge and expertise. Yet, despite the sensational testimony before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIAs in the early 1990s, and a number of books and articles published on the subject, in the end public debate subsided among all but the most fixated POW/MIA activists.[1]

Ironically, one of the most telling documents surfaced after the controversy was all but over. In June 1994, just one year after the Select Committee on POW/MIAs issued its final report, an American investigator conducting interviews in the former Soviet Union obtained a remarkable document from a former Soviet air defense officer who had served in North Vietnam for a year (1966-1967) as a senior advisor to the North Vietnamese Air Defense Command. The investigator was working for Task Force Russia (TFR), a Department of Defense organization formed in the early 1990s to find information about American personnel missing in action (MIA) from the Korean, Vietnam, and Cold Wars. And the document he uncovered consisted of several pages of hand-written notes from the retired Soviet officer’s personal notebook that recorded the results from the interrogation of Americans captured from two US aircraft shot down over North Vietnam in February 1967. The aircraft were an EB-66C, an electronic reconnaissance/electronic counter-measures aircraft that conducted long-range electronic jamming of North Vietnamese air defense radars, and an F-105F “Wild Weasel” aircraft assigned to locate and attack North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites using sophisticated anti-radar Shrike missiles. The EB-66C had been shot down on 4 February 1967 and the F-105F on 18 February 1967; three of the six EB-66C crewmen were captured by the North Vietnamese, as were both of the F-105F crewmen.[2]

The notebook covered only 15 days in February 1967, and was just a small part of a massive journal that the Soviet officer had kept during his two-year tour in North Vietnam. The Soviet officer told the TFR investigator that he had destroyed all the other portions of his journal at the end of his tour; this particular notebook had survived purely by chance. Even then, the officer refused to give the entire notebook to the American investigator, agreeing to part only with those pages that described the take from the interrogation. The pages were translated into English and disseminated to Pentagon analysts as the “Task Force Russia 294” report or TFR 294. Eventually the translated TFR 294 document and associated cables describing the investigator’s interviews with the source were declassified and posted on a Library of Congress website where they became available to the general public.[3]

The pages do not provide the names of the US airmen who underwent interrogation, or the identity/nationality of the interrogator. But in the initial interview of the Soviet officer and during several follow-up interviews, the Soviet officer insisted that the information had been given to him by the North Vietnamese in response to questions that the Soviets had submitted. The Soviet officer further claimed that neither he nor other Soviet officers were ever allowed to participate in interrogations of American POWs.

11 August 2013

Few issues have generated as much scholarly dishonesty as the study of communism and, more recently, the revelations from once-closed Cold War archives about Americans who spied for the Soviet Union.

In 2003 we published In Denial, which discussed how an embarrassingly large number of academics denied, minimized, avoided noticing, or, the last resort, justified Soviet espionage against the United States as well as such Stalinist mass murders as the Great Terror and the Katyn massacre. It was bad enough that such deplorable history was written prior to the 1990s. But our outrage was prompted by the sad spectacle of supposedly trained historians continuing to distort evidence from Russian and East Bloc archives that contradicted their biases.[1]

And it still goes on. One conclusion we have reached is that many of those who continue to write historical nonsense about Soviet espionage and communism are not consciously dishonest. It is not a matter of their knowing the truth and lying about it (although there is some of that). More frequently, we are dealing with intellectual “true believers,” ideological zealots who are mentally incapable of accepting or processing information that undermines their historical world view. To use a metaphor coined by the historian Aileen Kraditor, it is as if they wear special glasses that can only see what conforms to their world-view. Information that contradicts their fiercely held view is denied, explained-away, or, most often, simply ignored.

A recent example of espionage denial is James M. Boughton’sreview of Benn Steil’s The Battle of Bretton Woods, published in The Nation magazine. A former Indiana University professor and historian of the International Monetary Fund, Boughton has long denied that Harry Dexter White ever cooperated with Soviet espionage; a section of In Denial was devoted to exposing his fallacious arguments. Similarly, The Nation has a long history of refusing to accept that such left-wing icons as White, Alger Hiss, or Julius Rosenberg could be guilty as alleged. Not until 1995 did it offer a concession about Rosenberg, although even then it resisted the claim that he was a major atomic spy. While The Nation has published letters-to-the-editor objecting to its distortion of history, such communications cannot lay out in detail just how mendacious its authors are and how much evidence they ignore.[2]

11 August 2012

No matter how controversial the use of drones to kill al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders in Afghanistan or Pakistan may be, historians in the future won’t have to struggle over ambiguous, fragmentary evidence about who ordered them. Everyone understands it was President Barack Obama.

It wasn’t always so clear-cut.

In stark contrast, a half-century later there is still a lingering controversy over whether the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro (and some other Third World leaders) were ever authorized by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. By the CIA’s own admission, we do know the Agency was involved in attempts to kill/overthrow Castro as the leader of Cuba. But the doctrine of plausible deniability meant there was no paper trail—an express order—traceable from the CIA back to the Oval Office. Consequently, various defenders of these presidents have often claimed (the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. comes to mind) that it was unthinkable that President Kennedy would ever have given an order to “eliminate” Castro. More objective observers, noting the cold-blooded qualities required of and sometimes displayed by presidents, consider it entirely likely that in some cryptic, unrecorded way, Eisenhower and Kennedy did tell their heads of the Central Intelligence Agency to do so.[1]

Curiously, since it was the CIA that attempted to kill Castro in the Eisenhower-Kennedy era, the question of whether its directors authorized those attempts might seem more easily answered. Indeed, evidence is reasonably clear that Allen W. Dulles, who served Eisenhower as director of central intelligence (DCI) for eight years and then Kennedy for nine months, sanctioned such operations.[2]

The record regarding John A. McCone, whom Kennedy appointed as DCI in the autumn of 1961, has been unclear and even bizarre. Specifically, is it possible that the CIA carried out assassination plots without his approval or even in the face of his disapproval? It seems an absurd proposition if not a very disturbing one. Following the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961, in which Washington failed, in almost the most humiliating way possible, to overthrow Castro, some critics blamed the president for not authorizing sufficient air support for the Cuban exiles organized by the CIA to carry out the operation. Kennedy then chose McCone to succeed Dulles precisely because McCone had a widespread, well-deserved reputation as an aggressive, capable administrator and a ferocious Cold Warrior. He was also a Republican who might well have been Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense had the GOP won the 1960 election. As Kennedy once privately observed to his brother Robert, the selection of McCone was “useful.”[3]

Nonetheless, when evidence of the CIA assassination plots surfaced publicly a decade and a half later, the retired McCone insisted he had not known of any such plans. McCone advocated many aggressive actions against the Cuban leader’s regime, but claimed to have feared excommunication from the Catholic Church if he even discussed, much less approved, assassination plots. Yes, he recalled, a few colleagues in the Kennedy administration had occasionally made passing remarks about getting rid of Castro, but he had always squelched those suggestions.[4]

A Senate select committee headed by Frank Church (D-Idaho) in the mid-1970s investigated, among other things, assassination plots from the Eisenhower-Kennedy era. Several CIA and other Kennedy administration officials had vague memories of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara raising the idea at a 10 August 1962 meeting, and McCone was supposed to have fiercely objected to the topic being discussed. Yet the official, detailed notes from that meeting do not show the topic being raised, and McNamara and other key officials who were there claimed to recall no such conversation.[5]

Former DCI Richard M. Helms, who served as the deputy director of Plans (covert operations) under McCone, chose not to illuminate Church committee members about the particulars of that August 10 discussion. But on the general question of whether McCone knew of assassination plots carried out by the CIA while he was DCI, Helms stated that McCone “was involved in this up to his scuppers . . . I don’t understand how it was he didn’t hear about some of these things that he claims he didn’t.”[6]

Now, however, new and dispositive evidence is available derived from a meeting held eleven days later. We recently found notes from a cryptic telephone call McCone made to Secretary of State Dean Rusk on 21 August 1962, notes that have sat unnoticed for years in a box at the National Archives. They support the claim that while McCone opposed any open discussion of assassination proposals, he was witting and did not oppose the efforts as a matter of principle.

11 June 2012

With a background as the former Cuba desk analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency; the National Intelligence Officer for Latin America; and (currently) a university lecturer, Brian Latell knows well of what he speaks and writes. That is apparent by his new book on Castro’s intelligence apparatus. As Latell describes it, the book

is a penetrating look into the workings of one of the world’s best and most aggressive intelligence services now known to have been personally led for nearly fifty years by Fidel Castro, acting as Cuba’s supreme spymaster . . . so this is really a many layered story about him: his character, conspiratorial instincts, audacity, devious brilliance, and hatred of the United States. His many secrets exposed here for the first time reveal Fidel Castro in ways never before fully appreciated.

It’s more than a book about Fidel Castro and his secrets, however. The focus is on the second half of the 20th century when Cuba, acting as proxy for the Soviet Union, was stirring up trouble throughout the hemisphere and as far away as Africa. And Lee Harvey Oswald was to become a household namewith his November 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

Latell argues persuasively that Washington woefully underestimated the Cuban intelligence service overseen by Castro, with predictable results for US aims. “From New Year’s day in 1959, when Castro won power, until the summer of 1987,” Latell writes, the Cubans “were viewed as bush-league amateurs, Latino lightweights in the conspiratorial sweepstakes of superpower espionage. It allowed them to work clandestinely, in the shadows, largely beyond the sight and even cognizance of their American adversaries.”

Washington’s rude awakening, according to Latell, came on the first Saturday in June 1987. On that day Florentino Aspillaga Lombard, the most informed and highly-decorated officer ever to defect from Cuban intelligence, thrust himself into CIA hands via the US embassy in Vienna. The CIA “finally came to rue such self-defeating nonsense” as Cuba’s supposed intelligence deficit. The author interviewed Aspillaga Lombard for some fifteen hours for the purposes of the book.

While Latell makes no new blockbusting revelations, the book contains enough new information regarding Cuba/Castro and the United States to make it well worth the time of anyone interested in the subject. One of the most important of the many telling anecdotal incidents in the book concerns Fidel Castro’s “Armageddon Letter,” written to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. As Latell describes it,

Fidel recognized that the crisis was coming to a head, that Cuba was in acute peril. Thirty years later at an international conference in Havana on the missile crisis, he recalled his thinking on that last night of the nuclear showdown:

“On that night we saw . . . we saw no possible solution. We couldn’t see a solution. We couldn’t see a way out.” He went to the embassy determined to communicate securely with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev.

Angry and bellicose, Castro behaved as he always did when under pressure: He seized the initiative. Until then he had been on the sidelines of he crisis; now he thrust himself into its combustible center. Kennedy and Khrushchev were struggling to reach a peaceful solution, but Fidel remained intransigent, fearing his interests were being ignored. He was not being consulted and, worse yet, he suspected the Soviet leader was losing his nerve, that he might cave in to the Americans . . . .

Latell also devotes considerable space and detail to Lee Harvey Oswald and the November 22 assassination of President Kennedy, writing that Castro had prior knowledge. He describes Aspillaga Lombard as being at work in Cuba on Friday morning, 22 November 1963, monitoring US electronic emissions when he got a message telling him to “redirect his antennas . . . to listen to communications from Texas” some three hours before Kennedy was shot at 12:30 PM Dallas time, or 1:30 PM Havana time. “Castro knew,” said Aspillaga. “They knew Kennedy would be killed.”

The book recounts various plots supported by the CIA against Castro, including the controversial one involving Rolando Cubela Secades, a Cuban revolutionary hero in the fight against the Batista regime who had supposedly turned against Castro. “Cubela,” says Latell, “had been meeting secretly with CIA case officers in foreign capitals since 1961 and [was] recruited as a trusted agent in August 1962.” Until then, notes Latell, “the Agency had no high-level sources in the Cuban regime.” But contrary to the conventional wisdom, Latell argues that Cubela was a double-agent all along. Coming from Latell’s pen, this is a serious allegation because of the proximity of Cubela’s unsuccessful plot with the all-too-successful Kennedy assassination.

Unless and until the Cuban intelligence archives are opened, the answer to the question of Cubela’s true master won’t be settled—if then. In the meantime, Brian Latell has reminded us that several thorny and troubling questions remain outstanding.

11 April 2012

In the Author’s Note prefacing his book on the FBI, Tim Weiner describes Enemies as the “history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a secret intelligence service,” its major mission, according to Weiner, for most of the past hundred years. The book chronicles the “tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties”—except that as Weiner portrays the FBI, with rare exceptions, there is no tug-of-war. “Security” far outweighs civil liberties and the Constitution.[1]

This book is not an objective study of FBI history. Instead it selects examples that bolster the contention that the FBI put its wars against anarchists, Communists, the New Left, and foreign and domestic terrorists ahead of any consideration for the Bill of Rights. Weiner concedes that proponents from all these groups actually committed acts of espionage or violence. But for the most part, he features perpetrators who were never punished.

Weiner also oversells the role that surveillance played in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and beyond. As former foreign counterintelligence (FCI) agent Robert Lamphere noted in The FBI-KGB War, “only a small fraction of the New York field office [in the 1940s]—fifty or sixty men out of a thousand—was concerned with Soviet espionage and few agents outside the squad really knew or cared much about Soviet spies.” Add to that, foreign counterintelligence work was secret and could go on for years without resulting in any arrests or glory for its agents. That discouraged them from pursuing careers in FCI. By the post-Hoover era, foreign counterintelligence had become a backwater where one could place agents with the least ability such as Richard Miller, the first FBI agent to be accused and convicted of espionage.[2]

At the same time, Weiner either minimizes Bureau successes or turns them into reasons for criticism. Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, for example, the FBI had identified potential Japanese, German, and Italian spies and saboteurs and secured their arrest. Hoover opposed the 1942 internment of West Coast Japanese because in Hoover’s mind, everyone who posed a danger had already been detained. Instead, Weiner chose to emphasize whatever illegal techniques the FBI used to identify some of these enemies.

Weiner faults the Cold War FBI for not arresting more Russian spies. However, sources opened in the 1990s reveal that the Soviets had to change tactics and even recalled some spy handlers back home when FBI surveillance compromised their ability to contact their assets. As current FBI historian John Fox has noted, “Espionage is a difficult crime to prove, and prosecution for espionage, therefore, is not the standard by which to judge the success of a counterintelligence program.”[3]

11 February 2012

The relationship of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to communism and Soviet espionage has been controversial subject since 1954, when the decision of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to decline renewal of his security clearance put the issue firmly into the public arena. Journalists and historians addressed the issue repeatedly in the decades that followed. Nothing fueled the liberal/left critique of the so-called “national security state” more than the supposed excesses of the US government in the Oppenheimer case, save the cases involving Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs.[1]

But while the emotional level, even shrillness, of the debate continued, the substance of the argument became increasingly stale and repetitive; there was little new evidence to clarify the ambiguities of the matter. In the last two decades, however, new evidence has emerged that, while not resolving all ambiguities and still leaving a number of details unclear, nonetheless allows confident answers to the question of whether Robert Oppenheimer was a Communist and a spy. It demonstrates that he had, indeed, been a Communist but had not been a spy.

We addressed the issue of Oppenheimer’s involvement in Soviet espionage in “Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets on Soviet Atomic Espionage,” which critiqued and rejected the claims in books written by former KGB officer Pavel Sudoplatov and journalists Jerrold and Leona Schecter that Oppenheimer consciously assisted Soviet espionage and did so in a substantial way. This essay reviews the evidence indicating that Oppenheimer was a secret member of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA), joining at some point in the late 1930s and actively participating in a secret Party faculty unit at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939, 1940, and 1941. Secondly, it critiques the conclusion of Oppenheimer biographers Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin that he was never a Communist. Finally, it discusses the evidence indicating that in early 1942 he quietly left the Party, coinciding with, and likely connected to, his formal recruitment into the Manhattan atomic bomb project.[2]

11 September 2011

In 1995 the National Security Agency (NSA) began releasing World War II telegraphic cables between Soviet intelligence agencies in Moscow and their American stations. These cables, totaling more than 5,000 pages, were deciphered by the NSA’s “VENONA” project and are indisputably one of the richest documentary sources on Soviet espionage in the United States.[1]

One minor annoyance in the exploitation of the VENONA cables has been the NSA’s decision to redact some names and passages, particularly in footnotes written by Agency analysts. The pattern of redactions suggested that the NSA blacked out the names of individuals involved in Soviet espionage whenever they cooperated under questioning by the FBI, or when the identification of the real name behind a cover name was somewhat less than certain.

There was, however, one puzzling and prominent exception to the pattern of redactions being confined to the footnotes: VENONA cable 1354. Dated 22 September 1944 and sent from the chief of the KGB station in New York to headquarters in Moscow, this message discussed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), American WWII’s foreign intelligence agency. Here is the two-page cable as released by the NSA:

Such an extensive redaction of the actual text of the Soviet message can be found nowhere else in the more than 3,000 cables released by NSA.

10 August 2011

Last month, actress Jane Fonda published an article on her website titled “My Trip to Hanoi.” In the article Ms. Fonda tried to explain her two-week visit to Hanoi during the summer of 1972—and by doing so, dispel all the “slanderous” internet rumors and accusations of “treason” that have been made against her because of her actions during that trip.

Why address this old controversy now? Because a few days earlier, the television shopping network QVC, after receiving many protests, had abruptly canceled a scheduled appearance by Ms. Fonda to promote her new self-help memoir. So the article was intended to set the record straight. The Oscar-winning actress did offer an apology of sorts (really more of an excuse than an apology) for the famous photograph of her manning a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. But the bulk of the article was a defense of the trip and her motivations.

No one but Ms. Fonda can know what her true motivations were, but it is clear that the North Vietnamese exploited her for their own propaganda purposes. She would have been an idiot, which clearly she is not, to have assumed that they would try to do anything less.

One of the strongest charges lodged against Ms. Fonda has been that she was acting as a North Vietnamese agent when she took these actions, and therefore was guilty of treason. If that was the case, then she would presumably have been acting under instructions from a North Vietnamese official, probably a North Vietnamese intelligence officer. The next logical question, then, is whether Ms. Fonda had contacts with North Vietnamese intelligence.

11 May 2011

He entered the country in 1924, a Hungarian Jew and veteran of the Austro-Hungarian Army in the Great War. His name was Sándor Goldberger and he was a Communist. When he had applied for a visa at the U.S. embassy in Prague, he concealed his Jewish origins and claimed he was a medical doctor. An immigration officer caught both lies but no matter. Goldberger gained admittance, and overcame one of the major obstacles to his becoming the leader of Communist conspiratorial activities in the United States in the 1930s.

Within days of his arrival, Goldberger filed the first papers toward naturalization and found his way to the headquarters of the Hungarian Federation of the Workers Party in Yorkville, the Hungarian-German neighborhood on the upper East Side of New York City. A short man with a broad physique, he could easily have been mistaken for a neighborhood pharmacist. He worked for eight months painting faces on dolls and then was taken on as a full-time agent of the Hungarian branch of the Communist Party-USA.

As József Péter, as he was now known, the new agent worked from Chicago, selling subscriptions to the Hungarian-language party newspaper, Új Előre, and enlisting members into the Hungarian Federation. The campaign was hardly a success; in 1925, there were 550 members in the Midwest industrial belt and four years later there were only 205, mostly in Cleveland, the largest Hungarian community in the United States.

Péter was undaunted; he was a true believer who amazed his new friends with his ability to argue a hard ideological line. But he was also charming and ingratiating, and eventually party sachems promoted him to be national secretary of the Hungarian Federation and editor of Új Előre. He gained more attention by consolidating the printing of all party papers, including the Daily Worker, in the building on Union Square that became party headquarters. This efficiency so impressed then-Party Secretary Jay Lovestone that Péter was made an alternate member of the Central Committee.

11 November 2010

Philip Agee, the most notorious defector from the covert service of the Central Intelligence Agency, is coming home after living without a country for three decades. Agee died in Havana in January, 2008, at the age of 72. Now, his papers have been given to the Tamiment Library at New York University and will be open for public examination next April.

The library announced that the 20-linear-foot collection was donated by his widow, Giselle Roberge Agee, a German national and former ballet dancer. “We have an international reputation as a repository documenting the history of left politics and the movement for progressive social change,” Michael Nash, the associate curator, said.[1]

Included in the papers, according to the press release, are “legal records, correspondence with left-wing activists, mainly in Latin America, and others opposed to CIA practices and covert operations; papers relating to his life as an exile living and working in Cuba, Western and Eastern Europe; lecture notes, photographs and posters.”

While Agee’s life and career represent a small entry in the history of the Cold War, there are many parties interested in what these papers may contain. The first question will be, did Agee purge his files of the most damaging evidence of his perfidy as a secret agent? He took pride in revealing the identities of thousands of his former colleagues and their contacts in foreign countries with assistance of the Cuban and Soviet intelligence services.

Perhaps these papers contain information that will encourage the CIA to open its files about Agee’s undercover work and his activities after he left the agency in 1969. And, perhaps, the agency will produce evidence documenting one of the most damaging accusations against Agee: that he exposed a circuit of Polish Army officers who were supplying information to the West.

I have both personal and professional interests in these secrets because Agee was at the center of the strangest incident in my career as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. I never met Agee in person, but I learned a great deal while writing a story about him that was mysteriously buried by my editors.

11 September 2010

He is almost totally forgotten now. But for more than 30 years, Robert Sharon Allen was among the most influential columnists of his time, as celebrated as I. F. Stone, Walter Lippmann, or Drew Pearson. Allen rose to prominence in the 1930s as a political liberal, yet by the 1960s, he was one of the more conservative mainstream columnists in America, an unabashed nationalist who consistently emphasized the need for a stout defense during the Cold War. He counted among his good friends J. Edgar Hoover, the highly controversial director of the FBI.

Robert S. Allen also worked for Soviet intelligence.

In 1933, Allen was a fully recruited and undoubtedly witting Soviet agent. Under the assigned cover name of “George Parker,” he covertly exchanged privileged information for money. He provided the Soviets with intelligence about Japanese military fortifications; news about potential appointments in the incoming Roosevelt administration; and information about the US government’s plans for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.

If Allen’s FBI file is a reliable guide, the Bureau never suspected he worked for Soviet intelligence, or what was generally known in the ‘30s as the NKVD. Nor did such an allegation ever surface publicly or during Congressional hearings in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the hunt for suspected Soviet agents was at its zenith. Allen took the secret of his brief collaboration with Soviet intelligence to his grave. Still, the recent revelation of that work complicates the portrait of an already paradoxical man. And although his contemporaries like Stone, Pearson, Joe Alsop, and Walter Lippmann have attracted the lion’s share of historical interest, the story of Robert S. Allen offers an unusual perspective on the drama of those times—precisely because he did not fit any of the usual molds.

11 February 2010

When Charles Mathias died on January 25, his death generated the kind of coverage one would predict for a three-term senator who was long a favorite of the mainstream Washington media. In addition to the obligatory coverage in his home state of Maryland, there were lengthy obituaries in The Washington Post and The New York Times, and both newspapers also noted his death in editorials, a sure sign of respect given their shrinkage.

The eulogies recounted Mathias’s positions on a slew of issues—civil rights, Vietnam, Supreme Court nominations, campaign finance reform—that put him at odds with either his party or the White House incumbent, and sometimes both. Curiously, however, none of the articles mentioned his service in 1975-76 on the Senate Select Committee to Study Intelligence Activities, more commonly known as the Church Committee. Nothing Mathias did in his 34 years of public service was more revealing of the man’s integrity and decency than his performance during this probe, which Mathias had been instrumental in bringing about.[1]

In hindsight, and save for dissent over US involvement in Vietnam, no single event reflected the breakdown of the cold war consensus more than the Congressional investigations into the intelligence community in the mid 1970s. Unlike the controversy over the war, however, the season of inquiry on Capitol Hill threatened to do great and lasting damage to a cold war instrumentality that almost everyone recognized as necessary. One could argue that if the war’s critics were heeded, and Washington extricated itself from Vietnam, the United States would actually emerge in a better position to wage its policy of containment versus the Soviet Union. In contrast, few people were making the argument that the congressional investigations would lead to better intelligence. All the talk was in terms of exposing alleged wrong-doing and bringing the community—chiefly the CIA and FBI—to heel.

11 July 2009

Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from a longer essay entitled “I. F. Stone: Encounters with Soviet Intelligence,” which appears in the Summer 2009 issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies. To read the entire essay click here.

By Max Holland

Any reconsideration of I. F. Stone
should specifically address how he viewed the Cold War spy and loyalty
controversies—or chose not to—even if one accepts a minimalist
interpretation of Stone’s brushes with Soviet intelligence.

Stone often commented about the cases that rocked the country in the
late 1940s and were responsible for the repression, fear, and culture
of conformity that he repeatedly decried. Most frequently, Stone wrote
in passionate defense of government officials, high and low, who had
been unfair targets of smears and leaks, sometimes when their real
crime was to have opposed a powerful congressman on a point of policy.
One such occasion was the March 1948 attack by Representative J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ), chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on a government physicist named Edward U. Condon.
(Condon had been a prime mover in asserting postwar civilian control
over nuclear energy, which Thomas had bitterly opposed). In the summer
of 1949, Stone wrote a stinging series of articles in defense of
Condon, all of which roundly attacked J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for
compiling the innuendo that Thomas had used in his blundering effort to
destroy the outspoken physicist, who also happened to be Stone’s
friend.[1]

The case in which Stone became the most personally involved was the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—but
not during their sensational trial, when he stayed uncharacteristically
silent. Because he did not want to “play into the hands of reaction,”
he eschewed the “shrill, hysterical and mendacious” propaganda campaign
that insisted the Rosenbergs were completely innocent and victims of a
heinous government frame-up. Instead, he attempted to sit on the fence:
“we just don’t know” whether the Rosenbergs are guilty or innocent,
Stone wrote.[2] When he did become fully engaged, it was to crusade
against the great and unfair disparity between their death sentences
and the limited prison terms meted out to others convicted of nuclear
espionage.[3]

Although
Stone mainly railed against the injustices that occurred, he was also
prone to discounting the significance of a given spy case and insisting
that the truly bad actor was some element of the US government. That
was the line of argument he employed when the first spy case, involving
a foreign policy journal called Amerasia, broke in June 1945.
Stone was quick to suggest—falsely—that the prosecution was the work of
a “reactionary clique” inside the State Department, which, among other
things, was scheming to save Japan from decisive defeat so that it
could be preserved as a bulwark against Soviet socialism.[4] Four years
later, in a similar vein, Stone hammered on the theme of FBI misconduct
during the first trial in the Judith Coplon
espionage case, until her own appearance on the witness stand proved
disastrous to her credibility.[5] Decades later, he disingenuously
suggested that Victor Perlo,
his former source at the War Production Board, had been unjustifiably
“purged” from the federal government. “Now he would have been a sitting
duck if he was passing any secrets,” Stone observed. “But the
government never laid a finger on him.”[6]

10 June 2009

While we were writing Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America,
based on Alexander Vassiliev’s notebooks, we anticipated a hostile
reaction from battered but still rancorous remnants of the
pro-Communist left in the academic world and partisan pundits. Together
they have denied for more than fifty years that Soviet espionage in the
United States in the 1930s and 1940s had much significance, denounced
claims linking the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) with Soviet
espionage, and proclaimed the innocence of many of those identified as
Soviet agents.

We
expected the most antagonistic reaction would involve the traditionally
two most contested cases: that of Alger Hiss, and Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg. No one who studies 20th century American history can fail to
be astounded by the quantity and the viciousness of the assaults
leveled on scholars who dared question the innocence and martyrdom of
Hiss and the Rosenbergs. Historians Allen Weinstein and Ronald Radosh,
most notably, were subjected to years of attacks on their personal
integrity and professional competence for their pioneering and superbly
researched books on the Hiss-Chambers and Rosenberg cases.[1]

The opening chapter of Spies, entitled “Alger Hiss: Case Closed,” ended with our
conclusion that in light of new and definitive evidence from the KGB
archives recorded in Vassiliev’s notebooks, as well as the ample
evidence available earlier from other sources, “to serious students of
history continued claims for Hiss’s innocence are akin to a terminal
form of ideological blindness.” But we also noted, “it is unlikely that
anything will convince the remaining die-hards.”[2]
Similarly, we foresaw continued protests of innocence from the ranks
(albeit much-thinned ranks) of the Rosenberg defenders in the academy
and elsewhere to the extensive documentation in Spies of the extraordinary size of the espionage apparatus Rosenberg established. Spies
revealed for the first time, for example, that Rosenberg had recruited
a second atomic spy, Russell McNutt, in addition to the his
long-identified brother-in-law David Greenglass.

Somewhat to our surprise, however, the defenses of Hiss and the
Rosenbergs, while not disappearing, have taken a back seat to the
protection of I. F. Stone.

In the grand sweep of Spies,
which tells the story of KGB activities and networks in the United
States in the 1930s and 1940s, Stone is a very minor player, with only
a bit part. Most of the references to him are in passing, and the
totality of his activities take up only six pages out of 548 pages of
text. In contrast, Hiss has an entire chapter, thirty-one pages,
devoted to his case, while the section on Julius Rosenberg and his
extensive technical and atomic espionage apparatus is even longer.
Indeed, numerous other Americans who assisted Soviet intelligence
receive more attention in Spies than Stone simply because their roles were more important than his were.

Stone, however, is an icon in certain journalistic precincts, and to his devotees those six pages are the only ones in Spies that matter. Their responses match in distortion, whitewashing, spinning, and ad hominem
viciousness any that we have received over the years and give us a
better understanding of what Weinstein and Radosh had to put up with.
The history of communism and Soviet espionage have never been fields
for those seeking the scholarly quiet life, but the displays of rage
(real and faux) in regard to Stone have been impressive.

“Izzy, We Hardly Knew Ye”

To be sure, we anticipated there would be considerable interest in our
new material on Stone because the matter of his cooperation with Soviet
intelligence had been murky, and Spies brought forward some significant new information. In a 1999 book, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,
we had examined the evidence of WWII KGB cables deciphered by the
National Security Agency’s Venona project about Soviet contacts with
Stone and concluded that while the cables showed that the KGB hoped to
establish a covert relationship “there is no evidence in Venona that
Stone was ever recruited by the KGB.”[3] The Vassiliev notebooks, however, provided additional documentation, and in Spies
we wrote that the evidence shows that Stone was recruited in 1936 to
assist Soviet espionage in the United States and functioned into 1939
as a talent scout for new sources, a courier linking the KGB with
sources, and a source in his own right for insider journalism
information.

The
notebooks also showed that sometime in 1939 Stone’s assistance to
Soviet espionage ceased, although at whose initiative is unknown.
Stalin’s purge of his own security services had forced Soviet
intelligence to shut down most of its agent networks in America by that
year and, in any event, Stone was so revolted by the Nazi-Soviet pact
that he undoubtedly severed whatever relationship existed by that time.
In late 1944 the KGB again approached Stone, hoping to reestablish a
relationship, but the evidence was (and remains) ambiguous on whether
that was successful.

11 February 2009

How objective and
useful are intelligence postmortems of the kind produced in
Washington?

The press usually accords them an exalted status from the moment they
are released, whether they are produced by the executive branch,
Congress, or semi-independent commissions. Postmortems are regarded as
a reliable account of what went wrong and why, if not an
authoritative and objective one.

But should postmortems be embraced at face
value? Or are they subject to personal/political/institutional pushes
and tugs that can easily distort their findings?

In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, four separate
postmortems examined the performance of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The first two were internal reviews; the third was
coordinated within the intelligence community by the US Intelligence
Board (USIB); and the fourth was conducted by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

Despite the sameness of the facts at issue, the four ex post facto analyses varied dramatically. They were subject to extraneous influences that distorted their findings and
even their presentations of fact. The key conclusions depended on who wrote the postmortem, when, and
for whom.

The lesson from these once-classified postmortems is that after-the-fact inquests
in Washington should be viewed with the utmost caution.

The Critical Issues after October 1962

The public terms of the settlement all but guaranteed that
the missile crisis would be perceived as a sorely-needed triumph for
the Kennedy administration and the intelligence community, both of
which were still smarting from the Bay of Pigs debacle of the previous year.As Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, observed in early 1963, “the handling of the October crisis was, of course, superb (an easy ex post facto judgment, based wholly upon success).”[1]

Yet the
CIA’s margin of success had actually been dangerously narrow. When all the facts
were in, the missile crisis could be fairly called a “near-failure of
American intelligence . . . of the first magnitude,” as the late
Alexander George, a Stanford professor, put it in
1974.[2] All the intelligence estimates prepared prior to mid-October
predicted that the Soviets were not likely to implant
surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) on Cuban soil. Of equal if not
greater moment, the first hard evidence of the SSMs’ deployment was not in
hand until October 15, more than a month after they had arrived in Cuba and
just days before the CIA would deem some of them operational. That
meant Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had come shockingly close to accomplishing his strategic fait accompli.

The “photo gap”: the CIA discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba belatedly because

the Kennedy administration attenuated U-2 coverage in September 1962.

Both these intelligence deficits—one analytical, one a matter of collection— were hinted at in newspaper
stories published just after the acute phase of the crisis peaked. As a October
31 article in The New York Times put it, the first question was
whether intelligence “estimates [had been] tailored to fit top policy
beliefs,” or if administration officials had “reject[ed accurate]
estimates as erroneous.” Meanwhile, the collection issue—which would be dubbed the “intelligence” or “photo” gap—turned on why it had taken the administration so long to detect the SSMs’ deployment. “[T]here is general mystification about how the Russians
could have built so many missile sites so quickly without warning,” the
Times article noted.[3]

All four secret postmortems would address these two primary questions. There was, however, a
dramatic difference in the political consequences attached to each one.

03 September 2007

In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, four separate postmortems examined the CIA’s performance. The first two were internal exercises; the third was coordinated within the intelligence community by the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); and the fourth was conducted by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

Despite the sameness of the facts at issue, the four ex post facto analyses varied dramatically in their findings and conclusions regarding the CIA’s performance. Everything depended on who wrote the postmortem, when, for what audience, and from what perspective. The lesson of these postmortems from 1962-1963 would seem to be that all such after-the-fact inquests should be viewed critically, and with the utmost caution.

This article originally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2007), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clicking here.

19 May 2007

The 1967 arrest and indictment of Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill President Kennedy was one of the greatest travesties in the history of American jurisprudence.

That much was understood by 1969, once Shaw was acquitted after 54 minutes of deliberation by a New Orleans jury. What was not understood until fairly recently, though, was the lie at the core of DA Jim Garrison's persecution of Shaw. Garrison was duped by a false allegation published in a Communist-controlled Italian newspaper, Paese Sera. The Garrison saga would be almost laughable, given how the DA was so easily fooled, save for the tragedy inflicted on Clay Shaw, and the lasting damage Garrison wrought to the public perception of what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

Garrison forever changed the terms of public debate on the assassination. Before the New Orleans district attorney became involved, the worst criticism made of the U.S. government was that it had not been sufficiently devoted to, or diligent about, finding the true perpetrators. Garrison made the U.S. government--specifically, the CIA--complicit in the assassination itself.

31 March 2007

The Kennedy administration harbored three great secrets in
connection with the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, not just two, as
widely understood.

The most sensitive, of course, was the quid pro quo
that ended the acute phase of the crisis. In exchange for the prompt,
very public, and verified withdrawal of Soviet missiles, President
Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade Cuba and secretly committed to
quietly dismantling Jupiter missile sites in Turkey in 1963. Management
of this first secret was so masterful— involving public dissembling,
private disinformation, and a plain lack of information—that the quid pro quo remained a lively, but unconfirmed, rumor for nearly three decades.

The second secret involved keeping a lid on Washington’s ongoing effort to subvert Fidel Castro’s regime. Operation MONGOOSE,
which was overseen by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, played a
significant role in fomenting the missile crisis. Yet that covert
effort was not part of the public discourse in 1962 and remained a
secret in this country until the mid-1970s. Only after an unprecedented
Senate probe into intelligence activities did enough information seep
out to reveal that Castro’s fears of US military intervention (and
Soviet claims to that effect) were not wholly unfounded, however
mistaken.

It was the administration’s third secret, however, that
has proven the hardest to unpack. The Kennedy administration “shot
itself in the foot” when it limited U-2 surveillance for five crucial
weeks in 1962, which is why it took the government a full month to spot
offensive missiles in Cuba. If proved, this “photo gap,” as it was
dubbed by Republican critics, threatened to tarnish the image of
“wonderfully coordinated and error-free ‘crisis management’” that the
White House sought to project before and after October 1962. The
administration’s anxiety over whether cover stories about the gap might
unravel even trumped, for a time, its concern over keeping secret the quid pro quo.
After all, an oral assurance with the Soviets concerning the Jupiters
could always be denied, while proof of the photo gap existed in the
government’s own files.

Largely because the administration labored mightily to
obfuscate the issue, the photo gap remains under-appreciated to this
day, notwithstanding the vast literature on the missile crisis.
Recently declassified documents finally permit history to be filled in
43 years after the crisis, and these same records alter the
conventional story in at least one important respect. John McCone, the
director of Central Intelligence (DCI), and the CIA as a whole were
deeply distrusted by key administration officials in the weeks leading
up to discovery of the missiles. Moreover, the rampant uncertainty that
prevailed within the Agency, itself, has been downplayed, if not
forgotten, to the detriment of depicting the complexity of what
actually occurred.

The literature on the crisis has painted a
rosier-than-warranted picture of how human intelligence, assiduously
collected in September, finally overcame self-imposed restrictions on
U-2 overflights. What actually happened was not a textbook case of how
the system should work. And although tension between the CIA and the
administration abated after the crisis, it was not by very much.
Lingering sensitivity over the photo gap left a chill in the
relationship between the DCI and the Kennedy brothers, a result that
can only be labeled ironic, given McCone’s role in securing the
critical photo coverage.

An article on the “photo gap” appeared in the Winter 2005 edition of Studies in Intelligence, and may be read by clicking here.

Postscript: As the story of the “photo gap” shows, the
relationship between policy-makers, who prefer to learn whatever
corroborates their conceptions, and intelligence officers, who are
often cast in the role of telling the White House what it doesn't want
to hear, is a never-ending struggle. It is grounded in human nature,
and human nature is inveterate. Still, the abuse of that relationship
during the Bush administration was unprecedented.

15 December 2006

In the short space of five years, Americans have witnessed two major intelligence debacles: first, a sin of omission in 2001 (failure to detect and prevent the 9/11 attacks), followed by a sin of commission in 2002–03 (the estimate that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction). These failures produced four major investigations, two by Congress and two by special commissions, and eventually the most drastic restructuring of the intelligence apparatus since 1947.

The press is currently focused on the White House’s calculated leaks, undertaken to mask their misuse of bad pre-war intelligence. Yet the reordering of intelligence agencies is vastly more significant, albeit less titillating. This reorganization shows signs of creating a system more dysfunctional than the one it replaced. If nothing else, the revamped intelligence apparatus is going to cost U.S. taxpayers a lot more money with no discernible gains.

The centerpiece of the reorganization enacted into law in December 2004 was the creation of the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). It had been argued that the three-hatted job of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) was too much responsibility for any one person. Managing the CIA, along with serving as the president’s principal intelligence adviser, was said to be a full-time job, one that left the DCI too little time for, and not enough authority over, the 17 other agencies that constitute the “intelligence community.”

The 9/11 Commission made reallocation of these three responsibilities one of its top recommendations in its effort to “rebuild the bloated and failed intelligence bureaucracies,” as John Lehman, one of the commissioners, put it in a November 2005 op-ed article. “We wanted a strong national intelligence director to smash bureaucratic layers, [and] tear down information ’stovepipes.’” After George Bush appointed John Negroponte, a career diplomat, as the first DNI in March 2005, all eyes immediately focused on whether Negroponte would assert for himself the role of principal intelligence briefer of the president; that was not a foregone conclusion, not having been legislated. Negroponte did in fact step into that role—“face time” with the president being the single most precious commodity in Washington—and that marked a turning point. Besides representing a demotion for the CIA director and the agency as a whole, it turned the ODNI away from the lean structure touted by the 9/11 panel. Instead of presiding over the intelligence community as an overall coordinator, the DNI suddenly needed troops, and lots of them.

The ODNI now reportedly boasts 1,000 employees, including a principal-deputy DNI, three associate DNIs, four deputy DNIs, and 19 assistant-deputy DNIs; not to mention its own general counsel, inspector general, and all the other accouterments of any self-respecting federal entity. The restructuring has led (some would say all too predictably) to an entirely new bureaucracy on top of the already swollen bureaucracy that was supposedly a prime cause of the intelligence failures.

11 April 2006

One of the KGB’s most effective active measures during the Cold War was the use of disinformation (dezinformatsiya) to defame the U.S. government or at least prominent elements of it, such as the FBI and CIA.

The false allegations leveled via disinformation ranged from charges that Washington had deployed biological weapons in the north during the Korean War, to assertions that elements of the U.S. government (chiefly, the CIA) were involved in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

This article about Communist bloc dezinformatsiya originally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2006), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clicking here.

14 June 2004

PBHISTORY was the cryptonym for a CIA covert operation dedicated to the gathering and exploitation of Guatemalan Communist documents following the agency-supported overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

There were few, if any, sensational disclosures from this effort, although PBHISTORY supplied the U.S. intelligence community with a ground-level look at a Communist takeover by slow motion. But the covert operation did not succeed in its most vital purpose: to persuade Latin America to look at Communist penetration of the hemisphere from the standpoint of the United States.

The article about PBHISTORY orginally appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2004), and may be purchased from Taylor & Francis by clickinghere.